Tech
Newspaper Intertwines With Blog
While looking up some of the latest info about the Florida Everblades, an ECHL hockey team, I went to a website of a local paper I check out, Naples Daily News, from Naples, FL.
The direct menu link on the left for Everblades coverage took me to Bonita Daily News’ page for the Everblades. naplesnews.com and bonitanews.com have always linked to each other, shared stories, etc., and are E.W. Scripps Co. papers. The layout for the Bonita Daily News is vastly different to that of Naples Daily News. Simply different strikes you on the home page of BDN, but when you go deeper into the paper you start seeing columnist blogs and comments available on all articles, and you start to realize that it’s vastly different, and not just because of the look, but the function of the site.
Any blog-integration doubts I had left disappeared when I noticed the standard WordPress/Movable Type-type URLs and the fact that I could get to more RSS files than the ones linked on their RSS page.
This is the type of move I think most papers will start making. Better formats, more interaction with its viewers and better syndication. It seems BDN has had this format for about a month, as the oldest blog entries are from around the last week of October.
I haven’t seen many articles with many comments, but the two hockey blogs from Everblades beat reporter Andy Kent and Ernie Hartlieb, Everblades assistant captain and player, have very active comments section.
Server Down
Last night one of my servers went down, and yes, it helps host both my mail and hockeyfights.com. The server is being restored and I will have it back up sometime today. I’ve also ordered another, more beefy server to spread things out across and help prevent any further downtime after restoration. Theoretically not much should be lost (just some forum attachments). I’ll update as I can.
Update 10am: Since I’m being asked - when the server is put back up, I first have to re-setup everything: dns, email, web settings. The OS was corrupted and I’m using a different drive to put a fresh OS on, and then set it up again. The old primary drive is attached as a secondary, and I’ll be trying to save whatever I can from it. As I said above, theoretically there should be little lost, but it may take a bit to do.
Update 1225pm: New server is up and ready. I’ll be prepping it while waiting for the reload on the crashed machine.
Update 630pm: They’re working on restoring the crashed machine now.
Update 830pm: The crashed machine is up and running again. Time to get to work…
Update Sat 3am: Mail was restored a while ago. Things are slowly being pieced back together. ETA on hockeyfights.com being live again is sometime in the afternoon.
Update Sat 4pm: Still working on it. A couple of hours more should do the trick.
Update Sat 7pm: It’s back! Everything’s functional. There’s still work to do, but nothing related to downtime. Unfortunately, depending on your ISP, you might not be able to reach hockeyfights.com right away due to a DNS change. For some, it will be instantaneous, for others it might take up to a day.
Splogs a Growing Problem
Mark Cuban wrote today about how IceRocket (a search engine Cuban is a part of in some fashion) has blocked adding all new Blogspot blogs from being added to it’s blog index due to splogs. Splogs are “spam blogs” that are set up to do nothing but grab search engine traffic, and sometimes links from trackbacks, with either fake information or simply copied posts/articles from somewhere else. There are then text links or other ads on the splog to attempt to make some profit. They’re a waste of time for the end-user, but someone must be clicking, otherwise they wouldn’t do it, right?
I’ve noticed splogs are growing myself, not necessarily from search engine results, but from a few watchlists I have set up for my websites (mostly hockeyfights.com) through IceRocket, Blogdigger and PubSub. Luckily, IceRocket has an exclude feature, which lets me filter out splogs that are just copying my feed and/or the page the feed links to, but in the end they’re still harmful by turning search results into garbage, misleading end-users and possibly committing fraud depending on the advertising being shown.
AIM Fight
If you want to know who’s more popular at this very instant - you or the buddy you’re talking to on AIM, check out AIM Fight.
From the What is AIM Fight? page:
Why Fight?
What can fighting really prove? Using a complicated algorithm, AIM® Fight crawls through the depths of the Internet to answer the all-important question that plagues us all: How popular am I right this second?
How do I win?
Your score is the sum of the current number of people online who have you listed as a buddy, out to three degrees. This means the score is constantly changing, and the winner of the battle will constantly change with it.
“Out to three degrees?” Does this have anything to do with Kevin Bacon?
OK. It sounds a little complicated. But it’s not that bad. Here’s a diagram that makes it much clearer.
Sports Sites Revamp
Both CBS Sportsline and TSN have given their websites redesigns this week.
Sportsline has been given more of tweaking. A bit of a cleaner look overall, I definitely like it and think it’s easier to read. The front of the site has been designed for a 1024x768 layout. The rightside column doesn’t have too much sports-related content though. Mostly promos for CBS Sports TV, CBS News and CBS TV’s nightly schedule. The inside pages have the cleaner headers, but are still designed for 800x600 resolutions, however the expanded layout may still be coming, could just be a staggered rollout.
TSN was given more of a facelift. They also expanded the front page to cater to the 1024x768 audience and now there’s content everywhere. It’s a bit too crowded and even moreso on FireFox compared to IE (especially the menu). I can’t imagine they won’t fix that soon. There’s also a javascript error, but that looks like it’s due to one of their ad scripts. None of the other pages I visited seemed to be redone yet.
ESPN re-did their own site not too long ago, so I would expect it to be at least another year before another change is made.
Fox Sports and Sports Illustrated are still the only major sports sites that still have front pages that have designs catered to people using 800x600 resolution settings.
ISAPI Rewrite Convert for AllPosters.com PostersFeed
For quite some time I had a posters page on hockeyfights.com as an affiliate of allposters.com (affiliate link).
At first, I created a series of manual links from a text file they had. I downloaded preview images and the info needed, dumped some of it into a db and had a couple of pages.
It became a bit much to keep up with, so I stopped. I took a little piece of code from their affiliate website and just had an iframe that displayed a few top sellers that someone could scroll through. Not really ideal, but no work involved.
Eventually allposters.com released a datafeed. You download a series of files (text, csv or xml) and have all their store information. You can then easily dump it into a database (or use the files as they are if you like) and can build a relatively dynamic store from that. Images and such are all stored on their site and locations/names are referenced in the datafeed files. I wanted to do something with it, but never got around to it.
Semi-recently allposters.com released web services. Web services allow you to access all of their store info on their own machines. No more frequent manual updates. While I know I’d still have to update some code now and then, this was ideal and I wanted to take advantage of this to make a nice looking store front for my users.
Instead of building from the ground up I looked for an already built solution. I found a few ok ones and then I came upon PostersFeed XML by One Click Designs (demo store). It was neat and a good base for me to work with. I also liked that they offered Posters Feed Professional, which is the same script, but with a slight modification for mod_rewrite, allowing you to have cleaner urls (so besides looking nicer, they can be copy and pasted easier, and search engines will follow them easier). mod_rewrite is Apache web server-only. However, Helicon has made an alternative for us IIS users: ISAPI Rewrite. I use it a good deal already. I don’t run Wordpress anymore, but when I did I had a good set of rules that allowed me to do the same url rewrite as Apache users.
So with Posters Feed Professional and ISAPI Rewrite, and a few other conversions to the base script I was able to build a nice hockey posters store for hockeyfights.com. I’m not completely finished with it yet. I will probably add a few more “convenience” links on the right, along with replacing the ad up top with a posters ad (or perhaps a Google Adsense ad). I also plan on having posters come up on actual team and player pages when applicable. This is something that will require a bit more work, but should look pretty good when done (along with hopefully producing some nice conversion rates).
I’d love to post the code for the ISAPI Rewrite modification, but One Click Designs charges for the mod_rewrite tweaks (the base script is free, although they ask you sign up for the affiliate program through them so you would be a child affiliate of theirs at no cost to you). Because the ISAPI Rewrite script isn’t that different from it’s mod_rewrite counterpart I’d basically be giving their script away for free, which is something I obviously shouldn’t do. However, if you look at a few conversions (like the Wordpress one, or a few on Helicon’s forums), it shouldn’t be too hard for you to do the conversion yourself.
Here’s an allposters.com webmaster affiliate link, in case you’re looking to sign up as an allposters.com affiliate yourself.
Pushing Paid Content
If you head over to espn.com right now you’ll see lead stories of baseball streaks and slumps at the beginning of the season.
Out of the five stories contained in the main story area on the front page, four are accessible only to ESPN’s “in” members.
I think paid subscriptions is a good business model for many websites. For some sites it means no advertisements, for others it means premium content (a la espn.com). Either way, you’re usually diversifying revenue sources (generally, it means a site is not relying solely on ads). Slow sports news day or not, pushing your paid service by using the main content area such as this has to be as much of a turn-off to most of the audience as it is a turn-on to new members.
So is having however many new signups worth driving others away? For espn.com, I’d say the answer is most likely yes. Sports sites, and certainly ones like espn.com, can be extremely sticky. News sites in general have large return audiences and sports fans can be rabid. Chances are a one-day (or just a few hour) push to attract new paid members won’t do anything to traffic long-term. Sending some users to alternatives like Sportsline, Fox Sports or Sports Illustrated on a day where little is happening shouldn’t have any impact on tomorrow. However, if ESPN were to continue it’s push for a few consecutive days they might start to see a decline in traffic, at least for a brief period of time.
Bloglines Adds Package Tracking
I pimp Bloglines a good amount already. Now that they’ve added package tracking (UPS, FedEx, and USPS), well, I’ll just keep pimping it. Not only cool, but extremely useful and easy to use.
Nigel’s Blog
Crossing Jordan fans have a blog to add to their feedreaders. Dr. Nigel Townsend (played by Steve Valentine) keeps a blog, aptly named Nigel’s Blog.
There’s more than just a character’s personal entries there. Nigel is posting information about some cases the ME is having trouble solving and comments are on all entries to allow people to post feedback, and theories. NBC is encouraging comments by giving away prizes for people who post information leading to the capture of the killer.
It’s done pretty well, and it’s really the perfect kind of tag-along for this type of show.
It would be nice if they offered an rss feed for updates.
Fried, and Fried Again
For the second time in about two weeks I fried a processor. Both times were exactly the same: I touch my mouse, I feel a huge spark, and my computer freezes and then shuts off. Today was a bigger spark than the last time, and other people actually smelt the burn coming from the computer.
I have no idea why this happens, how I’m so full of static, but I have been grounding myself each and every time I sit down now. I also have a new mouse, just in case. Oh, I also have a headache, but I think that’s due to having to set up my computer - again.
This time I have a completely new model, so I have to slave my hard drive to another machine and hopefully get all the data off of it.
I love a fresh start, but prefer to have my fresh starts more spread out. That and being taken out of the loop for most of a day (when you expect to be in it) really drives you mad.